There has been much in the news lately about the illicit tobacco trade.
Successive governments have increased the tax on tobacco products to such a level that organised crime has taken over and is now smuggling in cheap cigarettes and tobacco.
The illicit trade is now bigger than the legal trade.
But putting aside the government incompetence over this, reporting on it has used an old an interesting word: ‘durry’ (sometimes spelled ‘durrie’).
Writing in The Daily Telegraph David Elliot says that he has always been ambivalent about the tobacco trade and then adds: ‘Of course I used to have the odd durry in the army. We call did.’
According to The Australian National Dictionary the word ‘durry’ first appeared in print in 1941, in Sid Baker’s Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang.
And if Sid was reporting it in 1941, it must have been part of the spoken language for some time.
There are two theories about where this might have come from.
One is that it is First World War diggers slang, from when the Anzacs were posted to Cairo in the Middle East conflict.
Supposedly ‘durry’ was the name of a local rug or carpet, and the joke was that roll your own ciggies tasted as bad is if you were smoking a bit of rolled up Egyptian rug.
And it is true that ‘dhurrie’ was the name of a heavy-duty cotton rug (originally an Indian name).
But the Australian National Dictionary says this is unlikely to be the source.
(It is not in W. H. Downing’s Digger Dialects).
They prefer the alternative theory that it comes from the American tobacco sold under the proprietary name of ‘Bull Durham.’
This came as packets of loose-leaf tobacco from W. T. Blackwell and Company in Durham, North Carolina.
This stuff was sold from 1850 until 1988.
We are more likely to think of ‘Bull Durham’ as referring to the 1988 Kevin Costner baseball movie—but the movie took its name from the tobacco, and so did our slang term ‘durry.’
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BY THE WAY...
If you'd like to see my A-Z list of Aussie slang, you'll find it here in the Australian Geographic website -- A-Z list of Aussie slang. Here’s the link: The A-Z of Aussie slang - Australian Geographic
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